Ralph ThompsonI AM pleased that The Gleaner editorial of April 9, 2002 entitled "Training To What End," dealt with the important issue of government support for tertiary education, an issue raised by Dr. Omar Davies, Minister of Finance, in the context of the increasing migration of graduates of the University of the West Indies.
There will always be a place for tertiary education, of course, especially in specific faculties like medicine, law, the humanities and management. But the crux of the debate is how government funding should be allocated between each link in the education chain, from early childhood education through the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. It appears that Dr. Davies, faced with the reality of dwindling government resources, is coming around to a position I have long espoused, namely that early childhood education rather than tertiary education should be our priority and be funded accordingly. Migration of UWI graduates may have jolted Dr. Davies to this awareness but I believe that there are reasons, more fundamental than loss of skilled persons, to justify such a position.
Of the four stages of the education process, Government regulates and funds only primary, secondary and tertiary education, with hardly a presence in the early childhood sector. There are only 29 government basic schools whereas there are 1,631 so-called community basic schools run for profit by private individuals, unregulated and unfunded by Government, catering to some 136,000 children up to the ages of five or six. This age group, about one-third of the primary school population, is critical to the future development of the child, the years in which character is formed, important skills of language, letters and numbers are imparted and the seeds of psychological balance and maturity are planted.
Basic schools are not just about play and supervision: it is important that three, four, and five-year-olds be taught to read at this stage by being introduced to phonics. The foundation is also laid in basic schools for mathematics by introducing the children to "number symbols" and relating these symbols to concepts of quantity. Sight reading and reciting numbers by rote are woefully outdated teaching techniques. It is in basic schools also that the best opportunity exists to bridge the gap between Patois and Standard English. Scientific studies show that children as young as four years old can handle up to three languages at the same time without confusion and this in addition to music. (Mozart was six when he composed his first symphony). It is only at the basic school level that we can hope to make our children truly bi-lingual, thus ensuring greater success at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels.
Yet teachers in the community basic schools are untrained and in many cases are paid by their private sector employers at the level of domestic helpers. Government requires a licence to operate a bar, a food handlers permit to run a restaurant, yet moulding and influencing the minds of our youngsters is left to Miss Matilda who opens a basic school on her verandah, with good intentions perhaps, but barely literate herself and lacking the skills to stimulate the imaginations of her young charges.
And the cost of tuition at community basic schools is not cheap, about $1,400 per week per child in some schools. With two children and/or grandchildren in basic school at the same time, this means that the poorest of the poor in our society, persons who have no one to leave their offspring with, must find between $70,000 and $90,000 a year to pay for their children's early education. At the other end of the social scale, tertiary education is being subsidised by Government to the tune of 80 per cent, a cost to the Jamaican taxpayer (including the poorest of the poor) of over a billion dollars a year. Surely this is a violation of distributive justice!
The need for government-regulated early childhood education is greater in Third World countries like Jamaica than it might be in France or Germany (from which we get the name 'Kindergarten'), countries which in any case place extraordinary emphasis on it. Young children in our inner cities and in the rural areas are victims of overcrowded housing without proper sanitary conveniences, subjected to and traumatised by early sexual stimulation and domestic violence that staggers the imagination. What, I wonder, does a machete conjure up in the mind of a five-year-old living in such an environment? Who can be surprised that so many boys turn to the gun and so many girls become mothers at 14?
Recommending government's priority intervention in and funding for early childhood education does not in any way absolve parents from their primary obligation as supervisors and educators of their children; it merely recognises the cruel fact that there are fewer and fewer unions with the requisite parenting skills to get the job done. Marriage in Jamaica is more honoured in the breach than in the observance, another root cause of our present dystopia, and even the stability of common-law relationships is fading as the entire society, for lack of moral clarity, falls into a state of crime and violence. In the private sector companies which I have run, unwed mothers apply for maternity leave without shame, already mothers of three children by two or three different men.
What little guidance children get from the existing early childhood education system is patently inadequate to prepare them for success in the successive stages of the education chain. And since a chain is no stronger than its weakest link, the primary and secondary links are affected by this pollution, a concatenation of mediocrity which rattles right up to the tertiary level. Abandonment of early childhood education by both political administrations is therefore counter-productive and clogs up the rest of the system.
If bottom-line proof of this is needed, consider Jamaica's record of unsatisfactory passes at CXC level in English and Mathematics. This is usually quoted to be a pass rate of 31 per cent for Maths and just over 50 per cent for English but the reality is much worse than it seems. By lumping the traditional secondary schools with so-called comprehensive high schools, there is a statistical camouflage which hides the appalling truth. Graduates of traditional high schools, only 22 per cent of the total high school population, score well on CXC examinations, thus pulling up the national average. When the figures are disaggregated, the record shows that the CXC results for 78 per cent of the secondary school population are 14 per cent passes in Mathematics and 39 per cent passes for English - an indictment of the existing education system that no amount of 'spin' can remove from the national conscience.
I hope that out of the current debate a consensus will emerge that education is more than training and surpasses instruction. Education is in fact one generation passing to another in the classroom certain truths and techniques designed to instill in children of the future an habitual code of conduct which will motivate them as individuals to make correct choices between right and wrong and as citizens to contribute to the common welfare of the nation. This is the indispensable foundation for democracy to work. If we have the will to fix the present malfunctioning educational system, starting with early childhood education, in one generation it can be returned to health and Jamaica will again be able to look to the future with hope and pride.
Dr. Ralph Thompson is a member of the National Council on Education.
